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THE 



BIBLE AGAINST SLAVERY 



T . 



A VINDICATION OF THE 



SA.ORED SCEIPTUEES 

AGAINST THE CHARGE OF 

A REPLY TO BISHOP HOPKINS. 
By Rev. J. B. DOBBINS, 

Pastor of the Third Street Methodist Episcopal Church, 
CAMDEN, N. J. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

KING & BAIRD, PPJNTERS, GOT SANSOM ST. 

18 64. 



HTt"3 




Camden, December, 1863. 
Rev. J. B. Dobbins. 

Dear Sir : — The undersigned are a Committee appointed by "Council 
No. 3, of Camden Union League of America, to confer with you upon the 
subject of publishing in pamphlet form, tlie series of articles which lately 
appeared in print, under the head of " Bible Views of Slavery," " Bishop 
Hopkins Reviewed," written as we understand by you. 

It has been suggested to our Council, that if these articles (In a com- 
pact form,) were distributed, they would serve as an antidote to the so- 
called Scriptural, but mischievous tract above named, issued and circulated, 
so extensively by sympathizers with the accursed system of American 
Slavery. If, therefore, in accordance with your views, we shall be pleased 
to have you take the necessary steps for an early publication of the same. 
Very respectfully, 

Your obedient servants, 

P. C. Brixck, 
Ralph Lee, 
Charles A. Sparks, 
Cooper P. Knight, 
Jacob Sides, 
Saml. Hufty, 
Jas. H. Chappell. 



Camden, N, J., December, 1863. 
Gentlemen : 

The articles to which you so kindly refer, and pay me the compliment 
of requesting me to publish in a more permanent form, were written at the 
request of several prominent citizens, who believed with myself, that the 
effort to secure for Slavery among the masses of the people, the sanction 
of the Bible, ought not to be allowed to pass unnoticed. 

The Bishop has been met by several "indignant protests" and scathing 
rebukes, for his manifest sympathy with treason and zealous defence of its 
source, but there has been no serious effort, so far as I know, to show the 
fallacy of his argument, and thus rescue the Bible from the charge of sub- 
serving the Slave interest. This I deemed necessary, and have attempted 
in these articles : and since their publication in a more compact and acces- 
sible form has been asked for in an informal way by many intelligent 
persons, and requested by yourselves in behalf of your Association, I 
shall take pleasure in acceding to your request, and will have them so 
published as soon as practicable. 

Very respectfully, yours, 

J. B. DOBBINS. 

(.379 ( 
*0S" 



zyc> 



THE BIBLE VIEW OF SLAVERY. 



Mr. Editor : — Some of our pro-slavery townsmen, are indus- 
triously circulating- a Tract, bearing- the name of " John W. 
Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont," entitled "Bible View of Slavery," 
in which the Right Rev. gentlemen labors to prove that American 
Slavery is not only not a " sin" but perfectly coincident with the 
teachings and spirit of both the Old and New Testaments. The 
pamphlet is an octavo, of 16 pages, only about four of which are 
devoted to the Scripture argument, while the remaining pages are 
taken up with an elaborate denial of human equality, and that 
"self-evident" truth that " all men are endowed by their Creator 
with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness," and with stern denunciations of 
those fanatical and ignorant persons, who "attach an inordinate 
value to their personal liberty," and especially of our anti-slavery 
preachers, upon whom he declares "the present perilous crisis of 
the nation, casts a fearful responsibility." Is that remark, about 
"inordinate" attachment to personal liberty, meant to apply to 
Mr. "Wall, Mr. Yallandigham, and their friends ? Alas I am afraid 
the good Bishop of Vermont has been betrayed into "political 
preaching;" for the pamphlet seems to be a political sermon, 
with the " Bible view of slavery" for the text. 

I think that Messrs. Wharton, Browning & Co., (the men who 
applied to the Bishop for the privilege to print and circulate his 
Bible View as a political document,) might have done better for 
their cause so far as the " Bible View" is concerned by re- 
publishing either Alexander Stephens' or John Mitchell's argu- 
ment on the same subject. To be sure these gentlemen are now 
both occupying official positions in the rebel capital, but their 
Bible arguments are in print, and easily accessible ; and as I 
conceive, they are altogether better and more forcible presenta- 
tions of that side of the question, than those of the Right Rev. 
Bishop of Vermont, who seems to possess on the subject, neither 
the information to be expected in the minister, nor the tact of the 
politician. 

THE MEANING OF THE WORD SERVANT. 

He sets out by affirming that " the term servant commonly em- 
ployed by our translators lias the meaning of slave in the Hebrew 
and Greek originals, as a general rule where it stands alone." 

Now the best authorities tell us that abed the Hebrew word 



translated servant is the only word used in the Hebrew to express 
all the relations of servitude of every sort, that the verb abed 
means to work, to labour, and the noun abed means a laborer; and 
that it is applied to a person who performs any kind of service. 

Dr. Elliott, who possesses not only an American, but also a 
European reputation for Biblical researches, in this line, says : 
" Indeed the Hebrew language had no single word to denote a 
slave ; and the context or peculiar phraseology must be aduced to 
show that slavery or slave is intended as no single word, will 
answer this purpose." 

This author says " the same remark will apply to the Greek 
word doulos — a servant and douleo to serve. These words are 
applied to any sort of service or servants. But there is a Greek 
word which properly means a slave ; this is the word andrapodon. 
The Greeks used the word doulos to express a servant in the most 
general sense while the word andrapodon properly means a 
a slave." And the latter word does not occur in the Greek New 
Testament. So much for his initial misrepresentations of the 
"Hebrew and Greek originals." 

If an intelligent man, in teaching a foreigner our language, 
should affirm that the word servant ; because sometimes used to 
express the relation of slave ; " has the meaning of slave in the 
English language as a general rules 'when it stands alone," a 
thoughtful person could scarcely avoid suspecting him with 
designing to misrepresent and thus to mislead those who might 
accept his definition. 

And the violation of truth is not less flagrant in the Bishop's 
declaration that the term servant commonly employed by our 
translators has the meaning of slave in the Hebrew and Greek 
originals where it stands alone — a slave in his sense of the word 
being one bound by the law to involuntary "servitude for life," 
and whose condition descends " to his offspring." 

THE CURSE OF CANAAN". 

He next comes to the curse pronounced bj Xoah upon Canaan, 
Gen. 9 : 25. We shall find hereafter from the history of this 
case, a very strong argument against the presumption that 
the Bible countenances personal slavery at all. At present 
I desire simply to state what has never been disproved, viz. : 
that the Africans (for whose enslavement this text is held as 
the authority) are not descended from Canaan; and I believe 
it is as clear a proof of the Divine authority for the murderous 
outrages of the rioters of New York, as for the enslavement of 
negroes. Canaan had ten sons who were fathers of as many 
tribes dwelling principally in Palestine and Syria. It is be- 
lieved that Canaan himself lived and died in Palestine, which 
from him was called the land of Canaan. The only descendants 
of Canaan (according to Granville Sharp,) who occupied any por- 
tion of Africa, were the Carthagcnians, a colony on the sea coast. 



Z77 



They were a free people and rivalled at one period even the 
Roman commonwealth in power. The Africans are principally 
descended from the three other sons of Ham, viz. : Cush, Mezraim 
and Phut, This opinion is supported by all the very best authori- 
ties to which I have had access on this subject, such as Granville 
Sharp, Jacob Bryant, Richard Watson, &c. 

It will be seen that the text in question has no relevancy what- 
ever to the question of negro slavery, whatever else it may be 
supposed to prove. 

THEY SHALL BE YOUR BONDMEN FOREVER.-Lev. 25: 44-6. 

Passing some minor texts for the present, I shall now proceed 
to the consideration of the passage in Levit. 25 : 44-46, which 
the Right Rev'd. advocate for the oppression of the poor, (a thing 
which this very lawgiver positively condemns, Ex. 22 : 21, and 
23 : 9,) thinks is " too plain for controversy." 

The material points in this passage are in the 44th and 4Gth 
verses — " Both thy bond men and bond maids which thou shall 
have shall be of the heathen that are round about you, of them 
shall ye buy bond men and bond maids. And ye shall take 
them as an inheritence for your children after you to inherit them 
for a possession ; they shall be your bond men forever." 

The first thing in this passage which seems to favor slavery, is 
the expression "buy:" but buying in these laws when used of 
servants was not of a third party but of the servant himself. 
The stranger bought the Hebrew, but it was of himself. Lev. 25 : 
47. Joseph bought the Egyptians for Pharaoh, but he bought 
them of themselves. Gen. 47 : 19-23. Hence the selling was 
nothing more than a contract between the seller and the buyer; 
and the thing sold was not the man, but his service for a limited 
term — so much service for so much money. Thus one might 
"buy" a Hebrew servant, but not for a longer period than six 
years, (Ex. 12 : 2 and Deut. 15, 12;) and even the Bishop will 
not insist that buying in this case implied slavery. 

There are two cases where persons might be sold by third 
parties. The thief might be sold for a term long enough to 
make legal restitution, if he were not otherwise able to satisfy the 
law, (p]x. 2 : 23 ;) but this was in the way of penalty for his crime. 
The father might sell his daughter, but not as a slave, but for a 
wife to either the master or his son. But the selling in the case 
of servants was not done except by themselves, and then it was 
nothing more than a contract to render service for a consideration. 
"We have no instance of the sale of a slave by his master under 
the Jewish law. 

The second point which seems to countenance the slave theory 
is, " Ye shall take them for an inheritence for your children for- 
ever." Having proved that the service contemplated was volun- 
tary and paid, and that therefore the enslavement of the heathen 
was not the thing designed, we must look for another meaning; 



and the only one consistent with the tenor of these laws clearly 
is — " Forever or through all the future you and your children 
shall procure the services of the heathen round about for the 
menial work necessary to be done in your families." If God's 
law had not forbidden chattel slavery, it is incredible that a man 
accustomed to his liberty should voluntarily sell his children 
through all their generations into hopeless slavery. 

That the service here authorized is not slavery but a volun- 
tary and limited servitude, will be abundantly established by the 
following considerations : 

First. If slavery had been here established there must have 
been in after times a largo body of slaves in Judea, as was the 
case in Egypt, Rome, and Greece, and as there is now in the 
United States. Slavery has existed in this country only two 
hundred and forty years, and we have now some four millions of 
these unhappy beings, the increase in the last sixty } 7 cars being 
more than three millions. Now if from a single vessel-load of 
slaves there should have come, in two hundred and forty years, 
four million, and that too in spite of a continuous series of legal 
restrictions and prohibitions by both the Federal and State 
governments ; how is it that after slavery had been in existence 
nearly sixteen hundred years with no opposition and all the sup- 
port of the Divine sanction, (according to the Bishop's theory) 
there were really no slaves in Judea in the time of Christ ? 

The only servants, says a good authority, mentioned in the 
narratives of the Evangelists, except where the words occur in 
Christ's parables, are the Centurian's servant miraculously healed, 
and the servants of the high priest's palace, (Matt. 8:5; Mark 
14: 65; Luke 22: 50,) and there is no evidence that these 
were slaves. " In the period elapsing from the close of the 
Old Testament canon till the birth of Christ," says Dr. Elliott, 
" there are no declarations to be found in the Apocryphal 
books, or in Josephus which declare or intimate that slavery 
existed among the Jews. Hence our Saviour, as his ministry 
was exercised among the Jews never came in contact with 
slavery among them." The Bishop affirms that Christ " lived 
in the midst of slavery," and that it was in full existence at 
the time (of Christ) in Judea" and seems to think he proves it 
by quoting from Gibbon a declaration that it existed in Rome ! 
— a fact never disputed, and which he might have saved himself 
the trouble of proving. Why did he not tell us how many slaves 
there were in Judea in the time of Christ, or at the period when 
the Jews ceased to be an independent nation, or at any previous 
period instead of telling how many there were in the Roman 
Empire ? That would have been pertinent, as it was not slavery 
according to the Roman, but slavery by Jewish law, that he 
undertook to establish. That he did not give us the number of 



zyt 



slaves among the Jews is the proof that he could find no record 
of any, as he is entirely too much in earnest to make out his case 
to omit a fact so conclusive in his argument. The increase of 
slaves in all slave countries has been a very serious and difficult 
question and their numbers have not escaped the attention of the 
historian. The Bishop has given us the instance of Rome with 
her sixty millions. Three hundred years before Christ there were 
twice as many slaves as freemen at Athens, and we are told that 
the Lacedemonian youth trained up in the practice of deceiving 
and butchering slaves, were from time to time let loose upon them 
and at one time murdered three thousand in one night, and we are 
all familiar with the cruel edict of the Egyptian king in dooming 
his male Hebrew infant slaves to death simply to prevent their 
increase. And here the Bishop would have us believe that 
slavery had existed in Judeafor nearly sixteen hundred years, and 
yet is not able to give us the name of a single author who tells 
us anything of their numbers and condition or even speaks of 
them ! 

If slavery had existed through more than fifteen hundred years 
throughout the territories of Isreal, their numbers must have been 
enormous, and cotemporary history could not have ignored its 
existence as it has not in those countries where it did exist though 
at much earlier periods than the time of Christ. 

In the next place slavery is rendered impossible by the divine 
prohibitions and restrictions found in the Mosaic code. In Ex. 
21 : 16, we have this law, " He that stealeth a man and selleth 
him, or if he be found in his hand he shall surely be put to death." 
This law is substantially repeated in Dueteronomy and is not 
directed against stealing a Hebrew as such, but against stealing a 
man; that it was not for the benefit of the Jews alone, is made 
further evident by the fact that Paul, after Judaism had been 
superseded, placed this crime among the greatest possible offences 
against divine or human law. 1 Tim. 1 : 9, 1 0. The things specifi- 
cally forbidden are stealing, selling and holding man, and the 
penalty for the violation is the highest known to the law, — death. 
Now stealing, selling and holding men are so obviously the three 
grand essential elements of slavery, that where they are forbidden 
slavery is an impossibility. Liberty belongs to man by natural 
and divine law, and by all just human laws, and as to steal accor- 
ding to Blackstone is "to take that which belongs to another 
without his consent," slavery must necessarily originate in theft. 
I suppose that even those northern parasites of the slave system 
are hardly brazen enough to insist that men ever of their own free 
choice consented to be taken and sold into perpetual slavery, and 
that their enslavement is therefore not a violation of the law 
against man-stealing. Dr. R. C. Breckinridge, a Kentuckian and 
uncle to the Ex- Vice-President, and now traitor General Breckin- 
ridge, says, in answer to all these special pleadings in favor of 



8 

the system, " Out upon such folly ! The man who cannot see 
that involuntarydomestic slavery as it exists among us is founded 
on the principle of taking by force that which in another's has 
simply no moral sense." 

Purchase implies sale ; but if God has authorized the buying of 
a man, how can he in the name of justice and consistency brand 
the selling as a capital offence, since that is essential to the trans- 
action ! Will those modern Shylocks who insist upon " the law " 
please explain how they can get their pound of flesh from this 
living; body without " one drop of blood ?" How they can buy in 
accordance with God's laws when these laws under the heaviest 
penalties forbid the sale ? The fact is there were no sales and 
hence as Dr. Elliot well says, " In the whole history of the Jews 
there is no mention of slaves as an article of commerce. There 
is no mention of them in the goods received. There is no 
instance of public sales. We have no mention of either a market- 
place for slaves nor of slave merchants. There were, we allow, 
such compacts as were necessary in fixing the terms of service 
between different classes of servants and their masters, in refer- 
ence to the various times and conditions of service, but no sales 
of men as property." " Nor was there any foreign slave trade 
between the Jews and other nations. To facilitate trade Solomon 
built Tadmore or Palmyra and Geber on the Red Sea. Yet in 
every allusion to the trade carried on with these and other 
nations there is no allusion to the traffic in slaves. There is 
mention of gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks, but no allusion 
to a commerce in slaves. If slavery existed among the Jews 
there must have been some account of the traffic in slaves, but as 
there is an absence of all this the conclusion is that the trade did 
not exist : and slavery could not exist without a slave trade of 
some sort." 

And this law ecpially forbids the holding of the stolen man. 
" By this law," says Dr. Clark in his commentary upon it, "every 
man-stealer and every receiver of the stolen person should lose 
his life no matter whether the latter stole the man himself or gave 
money to a slave captain or negro-dealer to steal for him." If 
all the holders of stolen men in our own country had been put to 
death, the few sympathizers with treason among us like this 
Bishop might have found something to do besides denouncing the 
purest patriots of the country as responsible for all the horrors of 
this desolating rebellion, and thus mislead the honest and well- 
meaning masses by means of ugly names ; but men with such 
low views of the value of personal liberty and of their selfish 
instincts, would not probably have been better employed. 

It is not surprising that the brethren of this Bishop in the 
ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, to 
the number of 79, including the Bishop of the Diocese, should 
feel compelled to make their "public protest" against "this 
defence of Southern Slavery," and to declare that " as ministers 



*7? 



of Christ it becomes them to deny any complicity with such a 
defence," and further that " as an effort to sustain on Bible 
principles the States in rebellion against the Government in the 
wicked attempt to establish by force of arms a tyranny under the 
name of a Republic whose corner stone shall be the perpetual bond- 
age of the African, it challenges their indignant reprobation. " 

Thirdly. The institution of Jubilee as given in Leviticus 25 : 10, 
made slavery impossible among the Jews, " Ye shall hallow the 
fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all 
the inhabitants thereof ; it shall be a jubilee unto you, and ye shall 
return every man unto his possessions, and ye shall return every 
man unto his family.'' 7 The Bishop says this enactment did not 
affect the servant, that it only extended to the Israelites who had 
" a possession and a family," while the text as he himself quotes 
it is — " Ye shall proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all 
the inhabitants thereof.' 11 He underscores "possession" and after- 
wards calls attention to it as if that were the only thing in the 
text relating to the subject of the proclamation. Most people 
would think " Liberty to all the inhabitants, 17 which he entirely 
ignores, a greater boon and more likely to arrest the attention and 
awaken the admiration of a generous nature than the restoration 
of a few comparatively worthless acres; but they are the fanatics 
who, as the Bishop thinks, "attach an inordinate value to their 
personal property. 7 ' 1 As between the properly of the slave- 
master and personal liberty, he holds that Bible laws are altogether 
with the former. The property clause of this proclamation he 
magnifies, while he utterly repudiates that which gives liberty to 
all the inhabitants. 77 He will not deny, I think, as he does not 
in his Bible View, that a servant was an "inhabitant," since 
an inhabitant is one who dwells permanently in a place as dis- 
tinguished from a visitor, and if not, he must admit that all the 
inhabitants includes them. Indeed the servant and the stranger 
are expressly named in the 6th verse, as among those for whom 
these provisions are designed. 

So far was this institution from conferring liberty exclusively 
upon the Hebrews that it was designed more especially to relieve 
the " bond men and bond maids — the children of the stranger" 
that dwelt among them. It will be found that Jehovah had made 
other provisions for the release of the Hebrew servants, and had 
limited the term of their service to six years. We have the 
original law in Exod. 21 : 2, 3, and in Duet. 15 : 12-15 The same 
law a little more fully expressed is as follows : " If thy brother, a 
Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee and serve thee 
six years, then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from 
thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt 
not let him go away empty ; thou shalt furnish him liberally out 
of thy flock and out of thy floor and out of thy wine-press ; of 
that wherewith the Lord thv God hath blessed thee thou shalt 



10 

give him." There were as it is well known, two distinct classes 
of servants — the Hebrew and the stranger or foreigner. The 
term for which the former should be allowed to sell himself, or 
service, was limited to six years, and the term for which the 
latter might sell himself, or service, was limited by the Jubilee, 
though if at the end of these six years the Hebrew servant 
insisted upon it he might remain until the jubilee, but beyond 
this none could be held to service in all the land of Judea. This 
fiftieth year terminated absolutely all obligations for service pre- 
viously existing. If the Bishop had been as well informed and 
as candid as we have a right to expect one in his position should 
be, he could not have overlooked this plain distinction, nor have 
failed to sec that this liberty clause was peculiarly the boon of 
the servants that were " of the heathen'' who were within the 
geographical limits over which this beneficent law extended. 

Finally, the law forbidding the return of the servant who 
should escape from his master, is another of those provisions 
which is utterly irreconcilable with the doctrine that slavery 
existed under the Jewish economy. It is found in Deut. 23 : 
15-16, and reads thus — " Thou shalt not deliver unto his master 
the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. He 
shall dwell with thee, even among you in the place which he 
shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best ; thou 
shalt not oppress him. 1 ' The Bishop says, " This evidently must 
refer to the case of a slave who escaped from a foreign master, 
else it would nullify the other enactments of the divine Law T -giver, 
and it would have been an absurdity." And thus even he 
acknowledges it to have been inconsistent with the institution of 
slavery. 

Suppose we admit the Bishop's explanation, does it relieve 
the difficulty ? Does he mean to say that the privilege of driv- 
ing and whipping slaves is peculiarly a religious privilege — a 
very means of grace, in which the poor heathen shall not be 
allowed to participate, and that, therefore, God by this law ex- 
cluded them from the luxury and conferred it exclusively upon his 
own people ? Such a law on the statute books of a slav2-holding 
community would be a monstrous solecism. Imagine South 
Carolina or Virginia enacting and placing upon her statute books 
such a law ! Why Mr, Jefferson Davis declares that he would 
rather associate with hyenas than with northern people, though 
their opposition to slavery — the cause of his antipathy — has 
never gone half the length of this law. The most they ever 
proposed in this line was a law requiring that a man should first 
be proved to be a slave, before he should he returned, and these 
laws, under the name of Personal Liberty bills, passed by a very 
small number of the states, have been alleged by such men as 
this Bishop, if not as a sufficient justification of the Rebellion, at 



^ f-e 



11 



least as a consideration which greatly modifies the crime of 
treason. 

These foreign slaves were not only not to be returned, but to 
enjoy their freedom and to be a sort of guest in the land of Israel : 
for the law is — " He shall dwell with thee even among you in the 
place which he shall choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh 
him best ; thou shalt not oppress him." As he was not only 
a heathen, but a heathen slave, why should not he have become 
subject to the laws of property as all his race were, (if the Bish- 
op's theory be correct)? A heathen slave according to this theory, 
enjoyed immunities among the Jews which a heathen prince did 
not, for this law forbids the enslavement of the former, while the 
latter might by this same law, be made a slave ! and thus the 
runaway slave was to be a person of no little consideration 
among these slaveholding Israelites 

No, Mr. Bishop, slave owners as a rule cannot be made thus to 
respect slaves, even by the divine requirement, and as Americans 
we have seen too much of the aggressive and ferocious spirit 
engendered by slaveiy, even in this age and country, not to see 
the sophistry and folly of your weak effort to reconcile this law 
with the existence of that institution among any people. 

I have thus shown that the Bishop's views of Lev. 25 : 40- 
46 cannot be true, because : 1st. — There is no account of any 
slaves in Judea in the time of Christ, nor any vestige of the 
history of such an institution among the Jews, which could not 
have been the case had slavery existed. 2nd. — These very laws 
most positively forbid all those acts that are essential to the en- 
slavement of men, as stealing, selling and holding them. 3d. — 
The institution of Jubilee would have rendered slavery in that 
community an impossibility. And finally that the law in regard 
to fugitives is utterly inconsistent with such a theory, and as the 
Bishop expresses it, "would have been an absurdity." 

THE DECALOGUE. 

The Bishop thinks he finds authority for American Slavery in 
the Decalogue and quotes the tenth commandment "Thou shalt 
not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neigh- 
bor's wife, nor his man servant nor his maid servant, nor his ox 
nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." " Here," ac- 
cording to the Bishop, "it is evident that the principle of property 
— anything that is thy neighbor's — runs through the whole." K 
this proves anything for the system, it proves too much, for it 
makes slaves of the wife and sons and daughters of the owner ; 
(see fourth commandment) and reduces them to the level of prop- 
erty — of the ox and ass — before the law. But does not the 
Bishop understand how one can have a right to the service of 
an individual for a term of months or years, just as he has to the 
affection and obedience of his wife and children, without anything 
analogous to chattel ownership ? A. mechanic said in my pres- 



12 

enee the other day " Mr. has taken away my workman." 

This according to the Bishop's reasoning would be proof of the 
existence of slavery in New Jersey; for "here it is evident that 
the principle of property — my workman — runs through the 
whole,' 1 and thus these mechanics were as certainly slaves as that 
the Bishop of Vermont is a logician ! 

According to this man it was no crime to " covet" and take 
away the liberty of a man — for these were necessary to his 
enslavement — but a very great Crime to covet your neighbor's ox 
or ass ! It was to such triflers with sacred things — such per- 
verters of divine truth the Saviour addressed himself when he 
said — " Wo unto you Scribes and Pharisees hypocrites ! for ye 
pay tithes of mint, anice and cummin and have omitted the 
weightier matters of the law, judgment mercy and faith" — "ye 
blind guides ye strain out a gnat and swallow a camel," Matt. 
23 : 23, 24. This Vermont ecclesiastic, it will he seen, is in 
the "true succession" and follows the instinct of his class of 
pompous formalities in his tenacity in regard to mint, anice and 
cummin, whilst he omits the weightier matters of the law, as 
judgment and mercy. 

A most excellent writer on this subject says — " This command 
says ' thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbors'- — that 
is, anything that justly belongs to him ; to every man belongs 
by the laws of God, and by all just human laws, personal liberty, 
personal security, and the pursuit of happiness. These must 
not be coveted by any person, because they are the property of 
another. But the contract for service by which one person vol- 
untarily binds himself to another becomes the just right of 
another and should not be coveted or seized by another. " lie 
further says these servants could not be slaves because the fifth, 
seventh and eighth commandments condemn slavery in con- 
demning the acts which originate or continue it. To enslave is to 
steal a man or to use him as stolen. And then the commandments 
on obedience to parents and on marriage clearly condemn the 
system. Those therefore mentioned as servants in the fourth and 
tenth could not be slaves seeing the fifth, seventh, eighth, and 
this same tenth commandment condemn slavery. The conclusion 
is that the Decalogue condemns, prohibits, and makes penal the 
entire system of slavery. 

CASE OF CANAAN" FURTHER CONSIDERED, 

I have shown that the Africans were not the descendants of 
Canaan, and that therefore any argument for the enslavement of 
negroes, based upon the supposed connection of these people 
with Canaan must be worthless because false. I desire now to 
show that they never became slaves, and that fact is strong pre- 
sumptive evidence that the Bible does not authorize or justify 
slavery at all. 

1st. Thev never became slaves so far as can be seen from Bible 



.2*7 



13 



history. God did command that the descendants of this man 
should be put to the sword, and " utterly destroyed" — Deut, 7, 
1-6 ; and that his people should "make no covenant with them 
nor show mercy unto them ;" but no where has he commanded 
that they should be enslaved. Those that escaped destruction 
were afterwards laid under national tribute to Israel, first by 
Joshua — Joshua 16 : 10, and then by Solomon : 1 Kings 9 : 21, 
but they still retained their own forms of government, in some 
measure, and became to Israel tributary provinces or communi- 
ties, and thus these Canaanitish races were brought into subjec- 
tion to God's people, and the prophecy — Gen. 9 : 25, "Cursed be 
Canaan ; a servant of servants shall be unto his brethren," was 
fulfilled. It is a purely groundless assumption that makes their 
punishment to consist in personal and perpetual bondage, rather 
than national subjugation and tribute. 

2nd. The inference is therefore inevitable that if these people 
were not enslaved then no people were ever ordained to slavery 
by the Mosaic laws, as there is no people of whom we have 
Jehovah's estimate who so richly deserved the entailment of such 
a curse, but upon them even God did not allow it to fall. 

SEPARATION" OF FAMILIES. 

The law in Ex. 21 : 2-4 in which the master is authorized to 
retain the wife whom he gave to the Hebrew servant after the 
latter's term of service had expired, the Bishop cites in proof of 
his theoiy. The passage reads — " If thou buy the Hebrew ser- 
vant, six years shall lie serve ; and in the seventh he shall go out 
free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out 
by himself; if he were married, then his wife shall go out with 
him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne 
him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her 
master's, and he shall go out by himself." The plain and conclu- 
sive answer is that the master had claims upon the Hebrews for 
only six years, while the service of the wife — who was a Canaan- 
itish woman — was his till the Jubilee, and any engagement which 
she might make, whether matrimonial or other, simply did not 
annul such obligations as she had entered into with her master. 
The Hebrew servant might however leave his heathen wife if he 
chose, because his marriage to such a woman was in violation of 
the laws of his people — Ex 34: 16; Deut, 7: 3-4; Josh. 23: 
12-13; Ezra 10 : 2-3-11, and Nek. 13 : 25-27. It will be seen 
by reference to the passages in Ezra and Nehemiak here referred 
to, that men who were even among the nobles were required to 
put away their heathen wives. Though this man had married 
such a wife contrary to the divine law, yet God was pleased to 
allow him the privilege, if he chose to accept it, of sharing the 
bondage of his wife and children (see verses 5 and 6) until the 
Jubilee when they might all go out free together. But what 
must we think of a christian (?) Bishop who pleads this law in 



14 

justification of the most iniquitous feature of our vile slave 
system ! The christian law, of which this man is a professed 
teacher, says, " Let every man have his own wife and every woman 
her own husband," and our blessed Saviour himself said, "For this 
cause shall a man leave father and mother and cleave unto his 
wife and they twain shall be one flesh." And one of the most 
positive and solemn injunctions of this divine Teacher is " What 
therefore God has joined together let no man put asunder," Matt. 
19 : 4-6. In the face of all this, here is a professed Christian 
teacher who says of the law in Exodus — " Here we see that the 
separation of husband and wife is positively directed by the 
divine command is order to secure the property of the master." 

"When this Bishop is obliged to meet a text — and lie cannot 
avoid them all — which he cannot by all his ingenuity torture 
into harmony with his theory, his reverence for God's word seems 
all at once to get the better of him and he talks seriously about 
" The well known maxim in the interpretation of all laws that 
each sentence shall be so construed as to give a consistent mean- 
ing to the whole, and assuredly if we are bound to follow this 
rule in the legislation of earth, we cannot be less bound to follow 
it in the legislation of the Almighty." But when he wants to 
make out a case for the slave master as against human rights, he 
suddenly forgets his maxim and does not hesitate to bring this 
law in Ex. 21: 24, into direct and positive conflict with the christian 
law of marriage in Matt. 19 : 4-5, that he may thereby justify the 
most indefensible feature of our cruel slave system, that which 
more than anything else "challenges the indignant reprobation" 
of mankind — the separation of husband and wife, parent and child, 
at the pleasure of the master. 

There were some of the Hebrew doctors according to Bishop 
Patrick who believed that a Hebrew servant might lawfully marry 
a heathen wife, but they held that the law in Ex. 21 : 2-4, applied 
only to that servant who had a lawful wife and children of his 
own, before his marriage to his master's servant, and that if he 
had no wife previously to this marriage, his master could not re- 
tain his wife and children, even though they were his servants 
and otherwise bound to him till the Jubilee. Not even those old 
Jewish teachers would allow such a construction of this law as 
would violate a lawful marriage contract. This outrage upon 
humanity and the pure precepts of our holy Christianity in behalf 
of the rights of property was lett for a christian Bishop — and he 
a man too, if one could believe him, whose "prejudice of educa- 
tion, habit, and social position stand entirely opposed to slavery !" 
So that, however contrary to his "personal sympathies, tastes or 
feelings," he has no choice left him, but must as a " christian" who 
tears God and " before whose tribunal he must render a strict ac- 
count in the last great da}'," insist that the rights of "property" 
are more sacred according to the divine law than loving, lawful 
marriage ! 



2- It- 



is 



That such a combination of wickedness and folly should "chal- 
lenge the indignant reprobation " of pure and honest men like 
Bishop Potter and his colleagues in the ministry of our neighbor- 
ing city, is what might have been expected. 

EAE-BOEED SEEVANTS-FOEEVEE. 

In the 6th verse of the 21st chapter of Exodus it is said that the 
ear-bored servant "shall serve him — his master — forever." Bishop 
Patrick says on the clause " He shall serve him forever" that is, 
"Till the year of Jubilee or until the master died. (for his — the 
master's son was not to detain him when his father was dead) 
unless his master would release him or he was redeemed." The 
Rabbins, "says another author, "contend that such servants were 
set free at the master's death and did not descend to his heirs." 
But at farthest he conld only be held till the Jubilee, which 
proves that the term "forever" is not to be understood in this 
connection in its literal and common acceptation. If, however, 
this construction should be rejected as I suppose it will be by the 
Bishop — since he quotes this very text in support of American 
slavery, to whom, pray, did this Jubilee tiring liberty ? He in- 
sists that it did not give liberty to the servants of the heathen nor 
to the ear-bored, Hebrew servants, and there were no others to 
whom it could apply ; for the Sabbatical year brought release to 
the mass of Hebrew servants once in seven years and thus of it- 
self brought to them the release of Jubilee without that institu- 
tion. Thus this Jubilee release, as I have already proved, must 
have been designed more especially for the ear-bored and Heathen 
servants; for it could have added nothing to the immunities of 
any other important class. 

THE PROPHETS. 

Before leaving the Old Testament, we will enquire briefly into 
the workings of these old Mosaic laws, as to servants, during the 
maturer periods of the nation's life, as we may suppose the popular 
understanding and construction of these laws, would find some 
illustration in the recorded incidents of their history. The dis- 
position to take advantage of the necessities and weaknesses of 
others, was not wanting even in Jewish human nature, and the 
out-cropping of this propensity afforded the occasion for God's 
own commentary on these laws. It will be seen that the Divine 
interposition was always in behalf of the servant, to prevent his 
oppression, thus showing that the design of those laws was not as 
the Bishop insists to secure the property claims of the master, but 
the personal rights and liberty of the servant. 

Thus in the 34th chapter of Jeremiah, we are informed that God 
charged that the laws of release had been disregarded, and by 
direct revelation ordered the immediate liberation of the servants, 
and as the city was then under siege, by the king of Babylon, they 
obeyed, but they afterward, when the danger seemed to be removed, 



16 

"turned and caused the servants whom they had let go to return, 
and brought them into subjection " again, and thus held them to 
involuntary servitude ; that is, made slaves of them. Then God 
threatened them for this sin with the greatest possible national 
calamities. He says, among other things, " I will even give them 
into the hands of their enemies and into the hands of them that 
seek their life, and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the 
fowls of the heaven and unto the beast of the earth," and for this 
crime of enslaving the poor, Zedekiah and his princes (says Dr. 
Clark) were taken captive, and the city after an obstinate defence 
was taken and plundered and burned to the ground. Slave priests, 
I suppose, would endeavor to break the force of this impressive 
history by alleging that these poor servants whom God so fear- 
fully vindicated, were of the same race as the masters, while those 
whom we enslave are not our brethren, but heathen. But they 
must show in order to give any weight to this objection that the 
Gospel dispensation does not place all men on the same broad 
basis before God, and thus establish the relation of a common, uni- 
versal brotherhood, a thing which they will find most difficult of 
accomplishment, for we are taught that in this Kingdom of Christ 
"there is neither Jew nor Greek," that is, heathen. " In Christ 
Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircum- 
cision." These old distinctions are all abrogated and done away 
under the Gospel. But suppose they were not, would the Bishop 
thence infer that the pious negro who is a genuine christian 
would have the right to enslave his profane and heathen master of 
another race, though he were a white man ? This setting ourselves 
up as God's anointed, and placing ourselves upon a higher plat- 
form of privileges than we suppose God allows to others; this 
assumption of peculiar prerogatives as belonging to the profession 
of Christianity in direct opposition to the whole spirit and letter 
of the Gospel, is one of the most pitiful pieces of pettifogging 
that even a pro-slavery priest could perpetrate, and nobody but 
the most ignorant or impudent could affect it. 

There is an instance in the fith chapter of the 2d book of 
Kings where if the heathen round about them were ever enslaved 
we might expect to see something of it. " A great host" of the 
Syrians came to fight against Israel, they were all taken captives, 
and though they were heathen, instead of killing them, or of 
reducing them to slavery, as many other nations in that age would 
have done, they gave them food and drink, and sent them back to 
their sovereign, the king of Assyria. 

On another occasion after a fierce and bloody battle, Israel 
carried away 200,000 captives with the intention of enslaving 
them, but the prophet Obed protested in the name of Jehovah 
against their wicked purpose and said, " Now hear me therefore, 
ami deliver the captives again ; for the fierce wrath of the Lord 
is upon you; and they took the captives and with the spoil 
clothed all that were naked among them, and arrayed them and 



2X5 



n 

shod them, and gave them to eat and to drink and anointed them, 
and carried all the feeble of them upon asses, and brought them 
to Jericho, to their brethren." See 28th chapter of 2d Chron. 

Here are three instances. In the one, those Israelites returned a 
" great host" of prisoners captured in the effort to invade their 
country, and though belonging to those nations whom the Bishop 
thinks they were authorized to enslave, they sent all these home, 
thus proving that the enslavement of Heathen captives was not 
their practice. In the other, one of the heaviest national calamities 
was the result of an effort to enslave these poor servants ; and in 
the third we see how the purpose to enslave some of their 
captured enemies was met by a direct and positive prohibition by 
Jehovah, and they not only relinquished their wicked purpose, but 
by way of atonement treated their captives with extraordinary 
kindness. They clothed and shod and anointed them, and gave 
them to eat and to drink, and carried all the feeble of them upon 
asses to their brethren. 

Another piece of Jewish history, showing how utterly irre- 
concilable slavery was with the spirit of those old Testament 
institutions, is found in the 58th chapter of Isaiah. The direc- 
tion of Jehovah to the prophet is — "cry aloud and spare not, 
lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their 
transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins." Their sin 
seems to have been hypocrisy in professing piety, and practicing 
oppression ; for he then proceeds to lay before them their hypoc- 
risy and says, they sought God daily, they professed to delight in 
knowing his ways, they asked of God ordinances of justice, they 
professed to delight in approaching God, they kept the fast and 
called it an acceptable clay unto the Lord, as if they were a nation 
that did righteousness and that had not forsaken God, &c. 
Indeed their professions of religious sincerity were almost equal 
to those of the Bishop in his Scripture View. But God said 
indignantly of all this exhibition of piety while indulging in their 
greedy extortion, " Is it such a fast that I have chosen ? — is it to 
bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and 
ashes under him ? wilt thou call this a fast and an acceptable day 
unto the Lord ? Is not this the fast that I have chosen ? to loose 
the bands of ivickedness, to undo the heavy hardens, and to let 
the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke V &c. 

Does this sound like encouragement to slavery ? or has it the 
ring of the usual utterances of slave priests ? The man who 
could profess to believe that the author of such trenchant denun- 
ciations of oppression has yet authorized the system of American 
slavery, is simply either incorrigibly stupid or incurably depraved, 
that is he is either incapable of seeing things in their true relations, 
or he perverts them for a purpose. 

If God had been speaking through the prophet directly to 
Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, on one of their several 
fast day occasions, it is difficult to conceive how the language 

9, 



18 

could have been more appropriate, and the flashing indignation of 
these telling sentences must have fallen like lightning strokes 
upon their obdurate hearts, and have made even them to quail. 
These hypocritical professions of piety amidst the ranklings of 
treason, and the clanking of the chains of the oppressed, exhibit 
a deeper depth of depravity than any charged upon the Jews by 
the prophet, and are almost enough to bring this same old prophet 
from his grave with his scathing denunciations of their profanity. 
And yet this Bishop professed to believe that Isaiah was the 
minister of a slaveholding church, and the prophet of God whose 
people lived by oppression. 

NEW TESTAMBNT-THE GOSPELS. 

Having presented a few of the many evidences that neither the 
laws nor the spirit of the Old Testament, authorized or allowed 
slavery in any proper sense, I now propose to follow the Bishop 
in his efforts to find authority for slavery in the New Testament. 
He really seems afraid of the Saviour's utterances — as if they were 
the air-drawn daggers of a guilty brain, and slurs them over as a 
lawyer would the strong and telling points against his client, 
which he feels he could not otherwise meet, knowing that any 
attempt even fairly to interpret them must only show the weak- 
ness of his own course. While he grants that as a Christian, he 
is bound by the precepts of the Saviour, he gives to the investi- 
gation of those precepts and to the whole of the Saviour's teach- 
ings less than a quarter of a page. 

His three points in regard to the Saviour's precepts, are 1st, that 
Christ "did not allude to it (slavery) at all ;" 2d, that the highest 
and holiest precept of Christ — Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself — was borrowed from the Levitical laws, and that his teach- 
ing could not be in conflict with slavery, since the laws from 
which he borrows substantially his golden rule were not ; (This 
point however he leaves somewhat misty as its clear and forcible 
presentation must unsettle his argument from the Old Testament, 
and thus destroy himself.) And 3dly, that "we are assured by our 
Southern brethren, that in the relation of master and slave, there 
is incomparably more mutual love than can be found between the 
employer and the hireling." Would it not be well upon the 
assurance of this Bishop for our Northern "hirelings" to go incon- 
tinently South and enter into this loving relation of slave to some 
Southern master ? Blood hounds and chains, and brands and 
whips, are at once the concomitants and illustrations of this 
mutual love. I suppose however the Bishop would not be so 
likely to refer us to these as to the great numbers of mulattoes, 
quadroons and octoroons, as affording both the evidences and 
illustrations of this " mutual love." 

After this brief parade of his limping logic, he goes off con 
amore into one of his fierce philipics against the "pertinacious 
declaimers against slavery," in which he unwittingly admits, 



£*V 



19 



much to the disgust, I should think, of his employers — Messrs. 
Wharton, Browning & Co., that slavery is responsible ultimately 
for all the calamities of this fearful rebellion. 

I have already shown that while we have the clearest evidence 
of the existence of slavery in the surrounding nations at and pre- 
vious to the time of Christ, there is no particle of historic evi- 
dence that slavery existed in the territories of Israel, while the 
history we have of this people is more complete than that of any 
other nation of that age. 

I have shown also that an effort to enslave some of the poor 
in Israel, six hundred years before Christ brought upon that na- 
tion the most terrible exhibitions of God's displeasure, and that 
at an earlier period a purpose to enslave certain captives was met 
by the prophet Obed with such a protest in the name of God as 
led them to abandon their wicked purpose. I have shown further 
Isaiah's vigorous denunciations of their hypocrisy in pretending to 
be religious, while they refused to " undo the heavy burdens, and 
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke." From 
these and other considerations the inference is irresistible that 
the institution of slavery did not exist in Judea at the time of 
Christ and that it cannot therefore be true that "he lived in the 
midst of slavery." 

The Bishop says Christ did " not allude to it at all," and there- 
fore concludes, he must have approved it as a heaven-ordained 
institution. That sort of negative argumentation, if valid here, 
might be used successfully in support of many of the worst 
abominations that ever existed. Take a single instance, Christ 
" did not allude at all " to those bloody, beastly gladiatorial scenes 
in which hundreds of thousands of men perished miserably to 
gratify a sort of infernal pleasure in human sufferings, though he 
lived when that institution was in its glory, and was everywhere 
practiced under Roman laws. jSTow suppose a few hundred thou- 
sand men in our own country were enabled to live in splendor from 
the proceeds of these worse than brutal sports, they might easily 
find some Bishop Hopkins to insist that they had Christ's sanction 
and approval, since " he did not allude to them at all," though it 
is a well-attested historical fact that the Roman ruler of Judea 
had as many as fourteen hundred gladiators at one time on its 
sacred soil ; and supposing men could be found who had conscience 
enough to oppose such wickedness and so awaken the wrath of 
these gladiatorial aristocrats, by their remonstrance, as that they 
should choose to rebel against the Government and set up a Con- 
federacy of their own, he might say in the language of the Bishop 
of Vermont, " How prosperous and united would our glorious 
Republic be at this hour, if the eloquent and pertinacious de- 
claimers against gladiatorial contests had been willing to follow 
their Saviour's example !" 

But is it ,true that Christ was silent ? Did he not insist that the 
distinctions among the Gentiles by which some exercised do- 



20 

rninion and authority over others, were to be excluded from his 
kingdom ? His own words are "ye know that the princes of the 
Gentiles exercise dominion over them — i. e. the people — and they 
that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be 
so among you, but whosoever will be great among you, let him 
be your minister, and whosoever will be chief among you, let 
him be your servant," Matt. 20 : 25-8. We are not to understand 
from this, that Christianity ignores proper government or au- 
thority in communities or families, for regard for these is suffi- 
ciently enforced by this same great Teacher. But it is such 
oppression, such arbitrary authority as the Gentiles used, that he 
forbids. The verb translated exercise dominion over, signifies "to 
get into one's power, master, overcome to rule imperiously." It is 
so used in Acts 19: 16 and 1 Pet. 5:3. It is precisely such rule 
as slavery implies which Christ here prohibits among his people 
and declares to be inconsistent with the relations he came to 
establish among men. On another occasion he said " Be not 
ye called Rabbi, for one is your master even Christ, and ye are 
all brethren," Matt. 23 : 8. And may one brother enslave another 
with Christ's approval ? Is there nothing in the relation of 
master and slave which conflicts with this doctrine of christian 
brotherhood ? 

Indeed slavery knows nothing of brother, wife or husband. It 
cruelly ignores these most sacred ties, and holds all the relations 
of its unhappy victims, however cherished by the affectionate 
instincts of our nature, as entirely subordinate to the master's 
rights of property in his human chattels. 

In the beginning of his public ministry in the town of Nazareth, 
Christ declared his mission to be to preach the gospel to the poor 
— to preach deliverance to the captive, and to set at liberty them 
that are bruised, and to proclaim or preach the acceptable year 
of the Lord, that is the year of Jubilee, a general deliverance 
when servants were to be set free. See Luke 4:18 This " gos- 
pel " and " deliverance " and liberty " were to the literally poor, 
and captive, and bruised, as well as to those spiritually so, and we 
have the strongest confirmation of this in the historical fact that 
wherever the gospel was allowed to influence communities the 
abolition of slavery invariably followed. It produced this result, 
not by violently assailing the institution, but by destroying that 
evil animus in men, and thus in communities which is the source 
of all oppression and social wrong. It did not merely prohibit 
specific forms of wickedness and wrong, for the spirit of evil 
would have modified those forms, and thus have evaded the letter 
of the law, but it much more effectually guards the weak and 
helpless against oppression by requiring all who have the 
power to control others to regard them as brethren, and to do 
unto others as they would have others to do unto them. Christ 
says to the master " Treat your slave as yourself would be 
treated." Remember he is your brother, and see that he receives 



2-ff 



21 



a brother's treatment. The legal relations of the slave which 
the christian master could not always control, might possibly 
remain for a time where these requirements of justice and human 
brotherhood were regarded, but under their operation, the essen- 
tial conditions of slavery must disappear like snow before the 
summer's sun. 

Slave masters saw years ago that the unequivocal testimony of 
the American Churches against slavery, must, if continued, des- 
troy their pet institution, and hence by threats and persecutions 
they either drove into exile or silenced those faithful exponents of 
a pure Christianity. 

The alternative was presented, of giving up slavery or of 
silencing by violence and brute force, the pulpit and religious 
press. They chose the latter, and thus brought themselves and 
their institution in direct conflict with Almighty God, and he is 
now settling the matter with them by a most terrific vindication 
of his Holy Law. 

SLAVERY IN THE APOSTOLIC CHURCHES. 

Many of the New Testament Churches in the apostolic age, 
were in slave districts, as those at Corinth, Colosse, Ephesus, 
Crete, &c, and it is quite certain that both slaves and masters 
were connected with those churches. I suppose the word servant 
in the epistolary correspondence of the apostles with those 
churches means slave, as that was unquestionably the general 
sense of the original word in those communities, just as servant 
means slave in our Southren States, and if it can be shown from 
that correspondence that Roman slavery was maintained to be 
just and right by the apostles, then may American slavery in the 
main, claim the apostles as its patrons. Though it would be an 
anomaly indeed to find the apostles of a " Gospel to the poor" 
advocating a system for their oppression, which even Roman 
legislators insisted was " contrary to natural rights." 

Presuming the Bishop to have selected from the apostles those 
passages which he supposed established most conclusively his 
slave theory, I shall limit the defence to a consideration of these. 
His first passage is from Eph. 5 : 9, " Servants be obedient to 
them that are your masters, according to the flesh (or in all tem- 
poral things) in fear and trembling, in singleness of your hearts 
as unto Christ, not with eye service as men-pleasers, but as the 
servants of Christ ; and ye masters do the same things unto them, 
forbearing threatening, knowing that your Master also is in 
heaven ; neither is there any respect of persons with him." 
Here is an exhortation to the christian servants at Ephesus to 
render cheerful obedience not so much from fear of man as from 
a desire to please God "with fear and trembling": that is, says 
Bengel, " Just as if threatenings so far as concerns christian 
masters were not removed." 

Is not this exhortation just as appropriate to hired servants as 



22 

it would be to slaves, and if so how can it imply an approval of 
slavery, and why should it be tortured into the support of an 
inhuman system, which could not have been less revolting to the 
apostle than to other humane persons ? Here he addresses also 
the masters : " ye masters do the same things." That is, as the 
servant is required to be conscientiously and cheerfully obedient, 
and not merely to obey from a fear of punishment, so ye masters 
treat them generously ; give them all that is due them and not 
only use no violence toward them, but do not even "threaten" 
them. The Bishop quotes again from Col. 4 : 1, directions to 
servants ; but as the language is almost indentical with that above 
from Eph. 6 : 5, it is sufficiently answered. Paul's instructions 
to masters however, in this passage deserve especial notice, 
" Masters give unto your servants that which is just and equal 
knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven." It would seem 
to require a good deal of audacity to bring this text forward, as 
the Bishop does in support of American slavery. " Justice" 
according to Justinian's Insts. " is the constant and perpetual 
disposition to render to every man his own." " To hurt no one, 
to give every one his own." These were the definitions of 
justice in Roman law, in the time of Paul, and no doubt entirely 
familiar to him, and if the master was bound to give the servant 
that which was just he must give him his liberty. Those very 
laws held that slavery was " contrary to natural rights" and of 
course contrary to the dictates of justice. " That which is just and 
equal.'''' As if the apostle had said the slave laws of Rome are 
not to be the rule to govern between christian masters and slaves ; 
those laws are unjust and unequal. Such masters must give ser- 
vants that which is equitable, just and right, regardless of any 
advantage which these unjust laws may give them over their 
servants. Those masters are now under the christian law, in 
regard to human relations which is, " Whatsoever ye would that 
men should do unto you, do ye even so to them." These obliga- 
tions are urged by the consideration that the masters themselves 
"have a Master in heaven" who is "no respecter of persons." 
In whose sight the relation of master gives no right to disregard 
this golden rule. The master and slave are alike responsible to 
Him and amenable to those laws of human brotherhood which 
he gave for the regulation of man's actions. 

He next cites the instructions to servants found in 1 Tim. 6 : 1, 
" Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own mas- 
ters worthy of all honor that the name of God and his doctrine be 
not blasphemed." It has been well said that the apostle here 
enjoined respectful obedience on " the slave, not because the 
master had a right in justice to such services, but that God and 
Christianity might not be evil spoken of." Christianity claimed 
the power to make men better, and the apostle was anxious to 
have this fact illustrated even among this most depressed and 
debased class of men. 



-2 £' 



23 



Slavery brought then as it does now the deepest degradation to 
its victims, so that in these days " Thief was commonly used to 
designate a slave, because slaves were geaerally thieves." St. 
Peter gives this same advice to servants, and for the same reason 
while he admits that they are greatly wronged, he says — " Servants 
be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and 
gentle, but also to the fro ward, for this is thankworthy if a man 
for conscience sake toward God, endure grief suffering wrongfully," 
1 Pet. 2 : 19. In the spirit of these inspired epistles, Mr. 
Wesley himself enjoined obedience on slaves toward their masters, 
while he still denounced slavery as the "sum of all villanies." 
And every true minister in this same spirit, is in the habit of 
exhorting men to the quiet endurance of evils which they see no 
way for them at the time to avoid. But to infer that such min- 
isters therefore justify such oppressions or evils would be an 
unmitigated slander. 

The Bishop refers us also to Paul's advice to this same class 
found in 1 Tim. 6 : 2, " They that have believing masters let 
them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather do 
them service because they are faithful and beloved partakers of 
the benefit." To quote such passages as this exhibits on the part 
of the Bishop, either a singular want of descrimination, or a great 
scarcity of texts in proof of the divinity of American slavery. 
Here the slave and master are "brethren'' " and therefore equal," 
says Bengel, and the servant is urged to obedience because they — 
the masters — are faithful and beloved, that is they "forbear 
threatening and give to the servants that which is just and equal." 
These masters were the generous benefactors of those who had 
once been slaves, but were now raised to the condition of breth- 
ren, and the apostle insists that these beneficiaries shall not be 
ungrateful and despise those whom they once feared. 

The Bishop closes his Bible argument with the case of Onesimus 
not certainly because he was able to see in it anything to strengthen 
his plea for slavery, but simply I suppose because it was inevitable 
as no slave preacher ever got through with his Bible argument 
without it. Or is their use of this case, a piece of logical strategy 
designed simply to employ the enemy and thus cover their retreat ? 
Onesimus was the servant of Philemon who resided at Colosse. 
For some reason he left his master and went to Rome where he 
found Paul, whom he had probably met at his own master's house 
and through whose instrumentality he was brought to Christ. 
Paul wrote a letter of which Onesimus was the bearer to Phile- 
mon, whom he requested to receive Onesimus, " not now as a. 
servant but above a servant, a brother beloved especially to me, 
but how much more unto thee both in the flesh and in the Lord. 
If thou count me therefore a partner receive him as myself. I 
wrote unto thee knowing thou wilt do more than I say," verses 
16, 17, 21. " Not now a servant " but " a brother beloved." 



24 

Could an honest man who is not insane quote this to prove that 
Paul would have Onesimus held as a slave ? 

" That white's white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow 
To prove it jet black, and that jet black is yellow." 

The Bishop is no doubt a "deep fellow," at least in the esti- 
mation of his friends — though hardly deep enough, I think, to 
accomplish this feat, as white will appear white to most people 
after all his efforts to blacken it. 

Paul was " not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles and 
the most revered man, then living among christians, and yet he 
would have Philemon "receive him — Onesimus — as" himself, and 
he enforced these demands by the intimation that Philemon was 
under very great obligations to him, (verses 19, 4) and closed the 
subject by saying that he knew Philemon would " do more" even 
than he had asked in behalf of Onesimus, verse 21. If the Bishop 
can really see a divine warrant for American slavery in this piece 
of history, his mental condition is pitiable indeed. " The times 
have been that when the brains were out the man would die, and 
there an end ;" but judging from the Bishop's strange attempts at 
reasoning one might think "the times" had changed and that one 
man at least somewhere up in Vermont was managing to live 
without them. 

Paul's advice to the slaves at Corinth shows very decidedly his 
anti-slavery sentiments. " If thou mayest be free use it rather," 
1 Cor. 7 : 24. Commentators agree that " mayest" does not 
express the force of the original, and think with Wesley that it 
should be "If thou canst be made free use it rather." In the 
next verse but one he continues — "Be not ye the slaves of men." 
Now that which he urges men to seek deliverence from and com- 
mands them so peremptorily to avoid, cannot certainly in his 
judgment be right. The Bishop affirms in opposition to Paul it 
is better for slaves not to be free — that it is " incomparabhf 
better to be slaves than be " hirelings," that is to work for wages ! 
How such anti-christian and anti-human doctrines as this can find 
fellowship among christians and freemen in the loyal States is the. 
greatest marvel of this age, and will be, I have no doubt, among 
the greatest mysteries to the coming generations. 

Having followed the Bishop through his Scripture argument I 
shall here leave him, as it was no part of my purpose to treat of 
the political, economical or ethnographical aspects of the slavery 
question. My object having been simply to prove, in opposition 
to the Bishop's theory, that chattel slavery did not exist among 
the Jews, and that it not only finds no justification or support in 
the sacred Scriptures, but that they clearly condemn, as a violation 
cf their social code, every essential element of the institution. «j 







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